Opinion

Glenn Miller disappearance gets PBS "History Detectives" treatment

An episode of "History Detectives" investigates the disappearance of Glenn Miller.
Photo courtesy of US Air Force (Provided by US Air Force)

If you've spent much time in Colorado, you are likely aware of Glenn Miller's rich local history, his high school in Fort Morgan, his time at the University of Colorado (where the Glenn Miller Ballroom remains a vibrant tribute), the Glenn Miller Archive at CU and the mystery surrounding his death.

Numerous conspiracy theories have been floated over the years to explain the unsolved disappearance of Miller and his plane on December 15, 1944. In Bedfordshire, England, he boarded a single engine C-64 Norseman aircraft to travel across the English Channel to Paris ahead of a holiday concert, but never arrived.

Was Captain Miller somehow involved in a spying mission? Was his aircraft shot down by friendly fire? Was the plane's inexperienced pilot wrong to have taken off in worsening weather? Did mechanical failure play a part?

Paging the "History Detectives" on PBS, who get significant help from a CU-Boulder historian and author on the latest installment: "The Disappearance of Glenn Miller" will air on July 8 (locally at 8 p.m. on RMPBS).

Neither the plane wreckage nor the bodies were ever found. Disagreement about the route Miller's plane took adds to the confusion.

Longstanding questions persist about a man who, the program notes, who was as big a musical artist and celebrity in his time as The Beatles.

Advertisement

In familiar "History Detectives" fasion, three history sleuths visit research libraries, interview eyewitnesses, study maps and sort the juicy gossip from the facts in a plodding search for clues. It's academic reality TV, the public-TV version of exciting.

Not least, the program observes that "the German-speaking Miller was working for the U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division, recording German language propaganda broadcasts and musical performances." Was his disappearance linked to a propaganda mission?

Spragg, senior consultant at the Glenn Miller Archives on the CU campus, serves as the clean-up hitter for the "Detectives" team. He produces an answer that combines the impact of natural and mechanical elements. He found that Miller's plane had a defective carburetor, a problem with induction icing from the fuel line, a fact well known to the pilots and maintenance crew at the time.

"You have a perfect storm of human error, mechanical failure, and weather; not independent of one another — all three," Spragg says onscreen.

By phone this week, Spragg said that, 40 years after the fact, he still gets at least one inquiry a day about what happened to Miller.

As a scholar overseeing archival material from 20th Century Fox, RCA Records, NBC and CBS as well as the military, Spragg provided tons of documentation for the TV show.

"If it has to do with Glenn Miller, we have it," he said.

Numerous "salacious theories" about Miller's disappearance — including one that conjured a heart attack in a bordello and another about being tortured by Nazis — have nothing to do with the facts, Spragg said.

"My story isn't sexy," Spragg said, "it's kind of depressing in that everyone made mistakes, but it's true."

The unglamorous production is the usual slow and steady "History Detectives" rendering, with lots of red herrings and crackpot ideas en route to an answer.

Still, the music and photos that accompany the search, the local connections, plus the pop cultural significance of the subject in this mystery, make it a worthy hour.